I'm currently using apt-mirror to create a local mirror of the Debian repositories.

As the mirrored repositories will be used only by machines destined to be headless servers and as an effort to reduce the current mirroring size (around 75GB), categories like games and possibly others will never be needed.

How can I go about specifying (on the mirror.list perhaps?) what sections/categories I want to be excluded from the mirroring?

Maybe a bit subjective, but apart from games what other sections/categories could be "safely" ignored from the mirroring for my environment purposes?

My mirror.list looks as below since all the machines are using precise.

Seems like you may want to run apt-cacher-ng instead. It will download the packages the first time any server requests them, and then serve the cached copies to any other server that requests the same. This way you don't have to store any packages your servers don't need, and every file is downloaded from the Internet only once.
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Steven KathApr 3 '14 at 2:00

This can be configured in the /etc/debmirror.conf. Just copy the example from /usr/share/doc/debmirror/examples/debmirror.conf, and do the configurations that you like. The important bit is the # @excludes_deb_section="";.

Thanks braiam. I can't confirm this yet since work has got me involved in many other higher priority tasks. will however mark as accepted and come back when i get some time allocated to optimize this again.
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OnitlikesonicJul 26 '14 at 22:50